Lucky Day Copies

OverDrive’s Lucky Day feature allows you to designate copies of titles as non-holdable and non-renewable in the digital collection. When used with popular, in-demand titles, this gives patrons a chance to get a copy sooner than they would if they just added their name to the end of a long waitlist.

Consortia members with OverDrive Advantage accounts will be able to designate their own Advantage-owned units as Lucky Day. At least one copy of a title must be made available for patrons to place holds, so titles will only be eligible if the advantage account owns at least 2 copies of it.

In our current setup, the OverDrive landing page is curated by MHLS staff. There are several automated collections, as well as a featured collection at the top, which changes to a different theme several times a month.

Example:

Simple Lucky Day copies:

The Lucky Day option that will be the least time-consuming for member library staff is to simply designate Lucky Day copies from their Advantage Collections. The OverDrive landing page will continue to be updated as it is currently, but holds would not accumulate on the Lucky day copies, and they will likely be available more often. Patrons can then serendipitously discover that these titles are available, but there would be no display to draw attention to the lucky day copies for the patrons.

With Advantage Curation:

Alternatively, libraries can market their Lucky Day titles to patrons in a featured collection, like this example:

This requires Advantage Curation, which is a bit more involved for Library staff.

Once Advantage curation is turned on, the library can curate a distinct OverDrive landing page for their location. Library staff will have access to the drafts and published collections developed by MHLS staff, but the collections will not change unless library staff manually updates their library’s page. Library staff will have to build their own Lucky Day collection, and organize their collections to display in the order they want.

When visiting the general landing page, https://mhls.overdrive.com, patrons will still see the consortium collections when they are not logged in. Once a patron is logged in, it will automatically redirect them to their home library’s landing page. Example: https://mhls.overdrive.com/mhls-eastfishkill/content (Currently, this is identical to main consortium page, since Advantage curation has not bee turned on, but this could potentially be customized)

Members may wish to use the direct link to their specific Overdrive page on their own website and marketing materials, which would allow patrons that follow the link to see the Library’s own curated landing page immediately, even without logging in.

Note:

Lucky Day copies will be available to all patrons, not just patrons of the owning library. It would be possible to have your own patrons on a waiting list for a title, while allowing a checkout to another library’s patron.

Lending Policies:

We currently do not have any lending policies assigned to Lucky Day titles, which means they would check out just like any other title. Patrons may check out an unlimited number of Lucky Day copies simultaneously, until they reach their maximum checkouts of 10 titles. The patron can choose the loan period that they prefer (7, 14, or 21 days).

We have the option to turn on lending policies, but they can’t be customized for each library. If we want to put these in place, they will have to agree on policies to be universal across the entire system.

We have options to set the number of Lucky Day copies a user may have checked out at one time, and we can designate a specific lending period for these titles, so we could limit these checkouts to 7 or 14 days, like we do with short loan books.